Why Do I Blog At My Age? Part 1
Before I go on with the rest of this guest post, I am just going to briefly introduce myself: I am ThunderDragon, a 22 year old who has recently finished a postgrad course at University and is now job searching. I am Conservative blogger, and I post every day on anything that catches my eye, from politics to social commentary to general rants, here.
When I asked Matt for some ideas on what topic(s) to guest post on here about, one of his suggestions was “why I blog about politics when I am still 22″. I thought that this was an interesting topic, one on which I could probably write quite a bit and hopefully be interesting at the same time. So why do I blog at just 22?
There are two main ways of looking at age and blogging – you can either say “you’re young and thus don’t have any experience on which to base anything†or “different ages bring different, but equally valuable contributionsâ€. Even though I say that, my opinion actually lies somewhere between the two. To a certain extent, life experience is essential in creating intelligent and coherent political opinions. I wrote on my blog a while back a post on the Political Opinion Of ‘Yoofs’, as a reply to a CiF article claiming that “I’m only 18 – but my opinions are important†in which my argument was simply that 18 year olds don’t have any life experience, and so whilst their views cannot, and should not, be ignored, they should be less taken into account than that of a 40 year old.
So why do I bother blogging? I’m only 22, and only just finished University [having gone back as a postgrad]. But I now have experience of living, unlike the vast majority of 18 year olds. I don’t think that I would have started blogging when I was 18, even if I had known what blogging was back then, simply because my political opinions were still very much in a state of flux, formed only by the few life experiences which I had had at that point. Now, however, having been through University and having got a least a semblance of real life experience, with a History and Politics degree tacked on, my opinions are formed well enough to actually argue them, with some basis in reality rather than just a perception of reality. Despite this, I am fully aware that my opinions are inevitably going to develop and change. Over the past year which I have been blogging, I have learnt a lot and adjusted my thinking accordingly.
Nevertheless, young people are the future of this country and of the world. Our opinions do deserve to be taken seriously, even with some adjustments. I blog, even though I am just 22, because I think that the voice of my age group does need to be heard. We see the world in a different way to generations before us. So of this is good, and some of this is bad. And this is one of the things I hope to look at in my next guest post* on the Wardman Wire.
*I don’t know how many posts will be in this series yet…
Article Series - Why Do I Blog?
- Why Do I Blog At My Age? Part 1
- Why Do I Blog At My Age? Part 1.5
- Why Do I Blog At My Age? Part 2
Categories: Political Blogging, Uncategorized
I look forward to reading more of the series. I think it is great that anyone of any age seeks to express their perspective on politics or anything else via blogging. Your thoughts are valid as your personal position.
One counter to this though, is that we are all creating a digital footprint online – a record of our thoughts and feelings at a particular time in response to contemporary circumstances.
We need to consider the legacy of our views and how we might feel when these are used in future years should we rise to any dizzying heights.
This applies to everyone of course, but most of all to those who may be considering a career in politics and be subject to public scrutiny. We all remember that early video of William Hague at the Tory conference and the recent Spartacus confessions of government ministers about drug use at University.
Blogging provides many more opportunities to develop our thinking – which can only be good. But also records our views for posterity.
I think blogging reveals that we are all (shock, horror) human. We grow and evolve. We are shaped by events we encounter and people we meet, and that, for a mentally sound person, is a lifelong process.
The premise that we magically reach a stage in life where we are ‘perfectly formed’, and all of a sudden are worth taking serious, somewhere in our twenties, sounds to me like an illogical remnants of Platonic ideas on innate, frozen, perfection.
At 30 I still have a lot of growing to do, and while I think it unlikely that my values will change, my opinions do not in any way constitute a finite, closed system. I started my media career as a political columnist when I was 18. I look back at those columns today and think to myself that, wow, that was pretty neat stuff.
By now, my interests have moved on and I mostly philosophise about media these days, perhaps I’m a wiser person, I certainly hope so, but as long as you take sensible precautions, like not publishing pictures you really didn’t want the rest of the world to see, I think blogging at your age is great.
Besides, blogging itself, at least in my experience, is very much a process: it forces you to clarify you thinking, makes you a better communicator, and hopefully a better listener.
Blogging also eschews things like age, isms, professions, nationalities: if you have something interesting to say it doesn’t matter which age or background you belong to, people will listen. There’s only one thing that nags me a bit about your post: you are much too humble – 18, 22, 25, 55, it doesn’t really matter…
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[...] the first post of this series, I wrote about blogging whilst “just†22. I suggested that there was a pretty [...]
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